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Even if you work for yourself, you're still working for someone else. An employee has 1 boss. An entrepreneur has a thousand, a million, whatever the number i

by brc 11y ago

Even if you work for yourself, you're still working for someone else. An employee has 1 boss. An entrepreneur has a thousand, a million, whatever the number is. Working for cash means exchanging value with someone who gives you the cash. The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real slavery.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real slavery. Most of the talk around "wage slavery" is about people who're going to spend the rest of their lives working hard for all their day on stuff that they don't like, for so little money that it barely allows them to stay fed and healthy. It's a different thing that the "real slavery"[0], but there are some important similarities - namely, people using up their whole lives to enrich somewhere else, with no capacity to opt out. The reason it's being brought up so often now is that in the past, "wage slavery" seemed a necessary component of survival of a society. People simply had to work. But today the necessary work is increasingly being automated, while we compensate with inventing new make-believe jobs living in closed loops that together have no useful output. So it's about time we should start aiming for freeing people from the need to work. -- I agree though that saying programmers are wage slaves is... weird. I suspect 'obrero meant something about lack of agency - as a programmer, you're to implement whatever stupid shit your boss envisions, and you have no say about it, even if it damages the environment you're working in. We may be getting paid more than a janitor, but that doesn't mean we have anything more to say about company's business than a janitor does. -- [0] - by "real slavery" we mostly think about a particularly brutal and dehumanizing enslavement of plantation workers in the United States; slavery in the past was often not unlike employment today.
- notahacker 11y ago
  To be honest, I'm struggling to think of any profession which less resembles the concept of wage slavery than programming, Compared with other jobs it pays relatively high salaries, offers more opportunities for remote and flexible working, more opportunities as self-employed contractors and more opportunities to start companies that don't even rely on contracting for others. In a company of any size, nobody has absolute agency and complete immunity from stupid shit that bosses envision, not even the zillionaire owners of the company who don't have to do performance reviews or attend standup meetings.

by brc 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> The concept of wage slavery is a tad insulting to those stuck in real slavery. Most of the talk around "wage slavery" is about people who're going to spend the rest of their lives working hard for all their day on stuff that they don't like, for so little money that it barely allows them to stay fed and healthy. It's a different thing that the "real slavery"[0], but there are some important similarities - namely, people using up their whole lives to enrich somewhere else, with no capacity to opt out. The reason it's being brought up so often now is that in the past, "wage slavery" seemed a necessary component of survival of a society. People simply had to work. But today the necessary work is increasingly being automated, while we compensate with inventing new make-believe jobs living in closed loops that together have no useful output. So it's about time we should start aiming for freeing people from the need to work. -- I agree though that saying programmers are wage slaves is... weird. I suspect 'obrero meant something about lack of agency - as a programmer, you're to implement whatever stupid shit your boss envisions, and you have no say about it, even if it damages the environment you're working in. We may be getting paid more than a janitor, but that doesn't mean we have anything more to say about company's business than a janitor does. -- [0] - by "real slavery" we mostly think about a particularly brutal and dehumanizing enslavement of plantation workers in the United States; slavery in the past was often not unlike employment today.

notahacker 11y ago
To be honest, I'm struggling to think of any profession which less resembles the concept of wage slavery than programming, Compared with other jobs it pays relatively high salaries, offers more opportunities for remote and flexible working, more opportunities as self-employed contractors and more opportunities to start companies that don't even rely on contracting for others. In a company of any size, nobody has absolute agency and complete immunity from stupid shit that bosses envision, not even the zillionaire owners of the company who don't have to do performance reviews or attend standup meetings.